Checkup on St Helens

The eruption of Mt St Helens on May 18, 1980 left ash on my car...in Denver!  I learned how abrasive the stuff was when I instinctively did what you always do when your car gets a dusting of stuff on it...I tried to sweep it off with my snowbrush.  The ash promptly damaged my paint job.  My mom watched the eruption from her living room in Portland!  Every few years it's interesting to go to St Helens and see how the landscape is recovering.  The Lizards enjoyed the visit too.

Well to the east of the mountain, there's still a ghost forest, 36 years after the eruption.  But a healthy boreal forest is steadily taking its place.

Closer to the volcano, eerie evidence of the blast persists.  Blow this pic up and you'll see that all the old downed timber is lying in the same direction...away from the blast, which swept a massive cloud of hot ash across the picture from left to right.

A large raft of logs still floats on Spirit Lake.  However, all the sludge that was in the water immediately following the eruption is gone, and the lake once again is full of fish, with healthy, clear water.

The crater of the volcano is slowly filling with lava domes.  In several centuries lava domes will most likely rebuild the mountain to its pre 1980 conical shape...if it doesn't blow its top big time again before then.  Large as it is, St Helens is estimated to be only about 38 thousand years old...a baby in geologic time.  It's the most frequently active volcano in the Cascade Range. 

Mount Adams.  It has not erupted in over a thousand years but is not extinct.

A good look at the crater of St Helens.  The last lava dome building activity was in 2008.